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Pharmaceutical Company Achieving Content Management Goals
Overview
One of the world's top pharmaceutical companies' sales and training divisions wanted to
- reduce the first draft design and development time of their courses
- streamline the review time by legal/medical review of course materials
- develop a system that allows for easy updating and reporting
- provide version tracking and content management
- develop reusable templates and content that will allow for increased efficiency creating new courses and updating existing courses
- make reusable objects independent enough to reuse without the need to repetitively be submitted to legal, and
- organize content so it can be found quickly.
Challenges
The challenges facing this company included
- general dissatisfaction with the ability to track version or history of content
- consistent difficulties for users to
- find content, and
- change content
- inconsistency and duplication of design and development effort
- lack of definition of a reusable learning object
- general frustration with the process for obtaining legal approval, and
- lack of a comprehensive list of courses and associated assets.
To be successful with their initiative, they required expert planning, a dedication of resources, and an efficient utilization of those resources, all of which is difficult with in-house staff already dedicated to other projects.
Solution
Information Mapping, Inc. (IMI) worked with this company in a two-step approach to address each of their challenges. The first step was to use planning days at this company to allow the company and IMI teams to
- define business goals and objectives surrounding the needs for content management and meta-tagging schema development projects
- identify causes of existing issues
- prioritize needed improvements, and
- recommend activities that will assist the company in meeting its goals.
The result of the planning days was a report of findings from IMI that the client can use as stepping-stones toward the successful completion of the content management/meta-tagging project.
IMI recommended a multi-phased strategy composed of six phases, described in the table below.
| Phase |
Name |
Description |
| 1 |
Content Audit |
Remove duplicate and irrelevant content from the existing materials to ensure a valid content set to start the next stages of the process. |
| 2 |
RLO and RIO Definition |
Define the purpose of and description of the Reusable Learning Object (RLO) and Reusable Information Object (RIO).et to start the next stages of the process. |
| 3 |
Information Architecture Development |
Set baseline category structure to facilitate accurate and rapid classification of assets during the meta-tagging stage. |
| 4 |
Standards Design and Development |
Refine the standards for processes and procedures, usage and design for the templates and other objects to be developed. |
| 5 |
Meta-Tagging Schema Development |
Develop the meta-tagging schema to be used for all electronically stored training material. |
| 6 |
Skills Transfer |
Train others in the use of the Information Mapping methodology used to develop the meta-tagging schema. |
Expected Results
With the assistance of Information Mapping, this company is working towards achieving its goals to
- improve efficiency of course development and maintenance
- increase delivery of incumbent courses due to reduction in development/maintenance cycle time
- develop a cover sheet for legal to tag information and manage content
- define and refine what is a reusable learning object
- move the department to a holistic approach
- deliver consistent, approved content, and
- improve work processes contributing to improved morale.
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